Sounds like you have closed captions set to ON. Turn them off. Click on 'cc' at the bottom of the screen. Works in the same way as YouTube (which you even mention). It's not a technical issue, it's a mental issue.

I just spent more than an hour dealing with a bunch of incidental technical problems for the sake of getting the subtitle file to sync and play properly. Especially since the opening frames of the video say "Criterion Collection", which is the name of an American distributor, I'd expected that they were real subtitles.

Only once I settled down to watch the film did I find that they're just Youtube-like gibberish, some sort of English-language speech recognition algorithm run against the German-language audio which results in nonsense text. The subtitle file downloads should really be completely deleted so that no one else needs to go through that.

Lack of subtitles didnt really detract from the story, a fairly simple , timeless subject which was easy to follow even in german,
what a bloody awful sounding language !!

w/ the film. From the BFI Film Classics series, by Anton Kaes, he really puts the period of the movie, Weimar Republic, into context. Terribly interesting. Too bad there are no subtitles-